Responding to your tags because I've followed you for a long time; take what I have to say with as many grains of salt as you will. While I believe that 1) cultural appropriation exists 2) many discussions of it are flawed 3) it is HARD to appropriate "Christian culture," that post itself showed how mainstream western ChristianIZED culture has made it so that it's very easy for secular westerners to just casually disrespect actually adherent Christians. [1/2]
It is frequently acknowledged that radicalized groups who claim a faith are not representative of the typical example of a believer in that faith. Islam is the most prominent example but there are others. Why then is it not acknowledged that, conversely, weaponized Western Christian Colonialism isn’t really reflective of people who believe in and worship Jesus Christ as is actually recommended in our Bible?
The suggestion that Christianity APPROPRIATED Judaism for example is a gross misrepresentation of how religious development works and ignores the fact that Jesus WAS a Jew. Anyway, the MET thing is highly typical and doesn’t really offend me, but it is offensive to suggest that Christianity wasn’t taken up and corrupted and used against its purpose just as much as other faiths just because those colonizers were more successful in their campaign of hateful “religious” violence.
Hi. Born and raised Catholic Christian here, actually. I think it’s worth noting that the post, as I was interpreting it, was talking specifically about western Christianity, as well as what my tags were specifying, because I know that western christianity is a very particular brand and things are quite different in other places in the world.
I’m a big supporter of Christianity being used and interpreted the way it’s actually supposed to be in western politics, if people believed and acted what was actually in the Bible: love for the poor, for refugees and outcasts of society, generosity and charity and acceptance of different faiths and peoples. Unfortunately Christianity in North America is usually rooted in very white, western Americanized Christianity, which is none of those things. It’s for a number of reasons (white saviour complex particularly comes to mind) but it is what it is, and while things are changing, it doesn’t erase what history is actually here.
And as I’m obviously not Jewish I’m not going to get into a debate of whether Christianity appropriates the Torah and other Jewish texts. (Given his belief system, Jesus aligned a lot with the Essene Jews, which is really interesting, but that’s a separate discussion as well.) But there is the fact that one of the ways early Christianity gained support in the Roman Empire was by reaffirming that they weren’t Jewish, and has had close and violent antisemitic ties since basically the founding of Christianity. It’s also worth noting that the post never said that Christianity had appropriated Judaic elements (there are many differences between the Torah and the Bible, what’s coming to mind now is the omittance of Lilith from most Christian texts, though), but that parts of Judaism have been appropriated in a “Judeo-Christian” country. And while I’m not educated on any particular details and can’t think of any right now (which is on me, I need to do more research) it would also align with the antisemitic elements that have always existed in Canada and the United States as well.
It also stands to the fact of false equivalence, namely that Christianity exists in a different cultural context then any other religion in the West. Any other religion is largely seen as other, or under suspicion, or grouped together with unrelated others (I’ve seen posts of Sikh and Muslims being mistaken for one another, for example). There are violent Christian groups, like the KKK and many others, and Christian extremists in other parts of the world and here in the states, and yet Christians are never looked upon with the same derision or distrust that many Islamic people face. Christians are never looked down upon for having to take their holidays off, because they already get them off. Even appropriating Christian culture and imagery doesn’t have the same impact—again, in the West—even if someone could, as it is Dominant in society, because Christians have never really been marginalized in the West.
While many religions and different sects of Christianity faced upheaval and persecution, which is part of the reason immigrants came to America and Canada in the first place, the fact is in a modern context, the most someone might think about another group of Christians—Mormon, Orthodox, Catholic, etc.—perhaps is that they’re a bit quirky, or very religiously obnoxious, but that’s about it. Even though Christianity above any other religious group has had a very violent history in the west with forceful conversion, antisemitism, and in-fighting in England and other countries. But is people and faiths from largely non-Western countries that hold the majority of our current fear, despite them having not stamped violence on ours and other’s history nearly in the same way that we have.
I want to thank you for following me for all this time, and thank you for making it to the end of this post. (I don’t think you’d get any hate for this, but if you do I’m happy to take it down, or if you’d like for me to respond privately, that’s an option too.) But I hope that perhaps my reply has helped you understand a bit better about where that post was coming from, even if by all means you don’t have to agree with it, and even here in my reply there’s a lot more I could have touched on. I also don’t mean to imply by this post that you don’t know all of this information, because you very well may, but this merely where I was also coming from upon reblogging it, and I stand by it as well.
I hope you have a lovely day.
